


At Certain Hours It All Breaks Down

by nogoaway



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e13 Dead Reckoning, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 19:12:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6091186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nogoaway/pseuds/nogoaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An entirely self indulgent Dead Reckoning coda.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Certain Hours It All Breaks Down

**Author's Note:**

> Plotless and not very interesting. Oh well! I wanted 'holy shit we're not dead!' cuddling, so here is some, brought to you by John's ridiculous canon touchy-feely-ness.

Harold can pinpoint the exact moment that John Reese decides to die in the 21-story on Mercer. He hears it in John's voice, the way it goes even quieter than usual. It's meant just for him. _Harold, I need you to stay away from the building_. A need. Not a request. Because Harold hadn't listened the last time, when John hadn't made that clear.

And of course Harold recalls right there on the park bench, with immediate and horrific clarity, eight separate times in the last three months that he has asked John "What do you need?". Two times when he's said, "Tell me what you need." Once, even, "Anything. Whatever you need."

The thing is, John always needs so little. But this, Harold can't give him this. John has to know that by now. He does know. Harold is sure of it.

It's still a little bit offensive that John pulls a gun on him on the roof. John knows how much Harold dislikes firearms, even if he doesn't understand how, or why. But John's face is sleek with sweat despite the chill, and he's staggering backward from Harold like _he's_ the one who's armed, and Harold has never seen John like this, never seen him truly terrified. So he'll forgive it, this crude hammering at his weak points by someone he's come so slowly to trust. The helpless, momentary cruelty of a desperate man.

He hasn't seen John in weeks. Has heard his voice very little. The man across the roof from him is a new kind of stranger, wild-eyed and slightly gaunt and bleeding from the nose, the mouth, a bruise blooming on his cheek--

Harold watched the yard beating a total of seventeen times before deleting it. He still doesn't understand why. It wasn't like he needed any incentive to strap on that vest and break John out of Rikers. But it was a way to be close to John in his absence, maybe. A way to suffer with him.

It wasn't fair that it was always John who suffered for Harold's mistakes, Harold's projects, his whims. Harold got him into this.

"Stop wasting time," he says, and John nearly laughs, and the barrel sinks, and Harold dives into the device, reverse engineering at what probably seems like a frantic pace, but this is how he works, it's how he's always worked: purpose, function, component, intent. Cause, effect. The vest is a circuit, the phone a collection of circuits. A plottable, decipherable system.

That it comes down to chance in the end is one of the great ironies of Harold's life, and it occurs to him that this is just as much Harold's past catching up with him as it is John's; all those phreaked telephone calls, all those hands of blackjack. All the times he dug too deeply, pulled at ARPA's pigtails, dared the universe to push back.

But statistics are statistics. Calculable. And John blows on his dice, tells Harold to pick a winner, and behind door number three is silence, silence, thank god--

Harold hits 'Cancel' with a shaking finger, because the simple mechanics of poking the screen is so much riskier than long division in his head; his body he can't control, aching with those forty two flights of stairs and shivering with adrenaline, but probability, _numbers_ , they don't shake.

Something like lightning runs up the length of his arms from his palms, tingling painfully. He feels like he's floating. There's seven seconds left on the timer. Seven. A holy number in many religions, a constant preoccupation of numerologists and occultists of all stripes. A prime number. The number of days in the week, of the Seven Seas, the Seven Sages, the Deadly Sins--

John is holding Harold by the shoulders too tightly, thumbs grinding into Harold's collar bone, and mashing their faces together.

Later, Harold will count it as a kiss. It's not, really. It's more John panting desperately against Harold's mouth, John's fingernails scraping at the back of Harold's neck, John's throat swallowing the small noises Harold can't seem to stop making, little half-sobs of terror and the shadow of grief that he just danced out from under, the angel of death who passed over his door.

It must last for seven seconds, because John doesn't let go until the explosion shakes the foundations of the building and a cloud of smoke and dust billows up from the street. Car alarms pulse and chatter in unison.

Under Harold's spread fingers and the damp fabric of the shirt, John's heart beats.

Sirens join the car alarms. In his pocket, Harold's phone vibrates. Detective Carter, probably, telling them they have to leave. They _do_ have to leave. He has to get John back into his jacket, and somewhere safe to get the rest of the vest off, and--

John's hands soften on his shoulders, only to run up Harold's neck and cup his face. John's eyes are pale and bright, and his mouth is wet.

"Stairs," he rasps, and it still takes the both of them a full forty seconds to move.

* * *

  
Harold disarms the vest within one minute of working on it, once they're safely behind the steel door of his Midtown safehouse. He keeps going afterward, takes each component out one after another and lays them in separate piles. Wires bound by color and gauge on top of the desk, capacitors in the drawer, Semtex stacked at the opposite side of the room. It's not necessary, but it makes him feel better.

"I could make use of that," John says, eyeing the blocks of plastic explosive. "Are you planning to--"

"Yes," Harold grits, twisting another strip of tape into a wad and dropping it into the trash bin. "I am going to dispose of it."

"Okay." John strips his shirt off over his head, wincing. Then he sniffs at it, and makes a face. "I need a shower."

Harold glances over at him, and immediately regrets it. John's chest and stomach are exactly what he'd expect, for someone who took a brutal jail-yard beating and was immediately thereafter involved in an automobile accident. He's more blue than anything else. "When did you last sleep?"

"Two days, if you count the knock-out drug." John says, and leaves a trail of suit on his way to the bathroom. "I won't pass out."

If he's in anything like the state Harold is, he can't; Harold's surprised his hands are steady. His heart is still rabbiting in his chest, and he's hyper-attuned to every noise outside on the street, the quality of light in the room, the movement of cloth settling on the floor.

When the shower hisses on, he jumps. John's left the door open.

He can't help turning to look. John's back is tense, his shoulder blades standing out too sharply in the harsh light of the bathroom. He's braced himself against the counter of the sink, staring down at his hands. In the mirror, Harold can see the freshest bruise on his brow, the abraded skin leaking a solitary bead of dark blood that John blinks rapidly to clear from his eye.

When John doesn't move for a long time, and the shower continues to run, Harold considers leaving. His friend clearly needs a moment. But he can't make himself, if he lets John out of his sight it might be weeks again, months, he might _never_ \--

Harold's up and moving without thinking about it, curling a hand around the door frame. "John?"

"She wasn't always like that," John says, and shifts his gaze to meet Harold's in the mirror. His eyes are pink and tired. He looks sick. The weeks in Rikers have left him leaner; John Warren wasn't the kind of man who would work out during a prison stay. "He was. But she-- she was always tough. But never so-- so bitter. Cruel." He laughs. "I wish I knew what happened, what changed."

Harold has already put 'finding out what happened to Kara Stanton' on his mental priorities list, right after finding out what was on the hard drive on the desk outside. "I'm sorry," he says. "You lost a friend."

"No. We were never friends."

"A comrade, then."

John shrugs, but Harold can tell that it's forced. "Not the first time. Won't be the last."

"Mr. Reese. You must know that I will not allow that to happen."

A smile pulls at John's face, crinkling his eyes. "You won't be able to stop it. But I appreciate the thought." He stands, finally, stretching his back out, rolling his neck.

Harold swallows, watching the muscles move under John's skin, bruised and scraped and raw. He has the sudden urge to reach out, to brush his hand across John's eyebrow and clear that trail of blood, to keep going until he could smooth the pad of his thumb over the silvery hair at John's temple. He clenches his hand tighter against the door frame, holding himself steady.

"I missed you," John says, apparently unconcerned about being naked in front of Harold. Why would he be embarrassed? He was beautiful, objectively. Harold envied him that easy confidence sometimes.

"Take your shower."

"Take it with me." John steps closer, and Harold knows he should step back, should close the door behind him. But he hadn't stepped back when John pulled a gun on him half an hour ago, either. Harold respects John's deadly physicality, but he is no longer intimidated by it. "It's warm. Your leg must be-- all those stairs." And he frowns, like Harold's mild discomfort and the much less mild muscle soreness that he'll surely be enjoying tomorrow are a real concern for him, for John who has been beaten and drugged and shot at and almost blown up--

"My leg is fine," Harold says, stiffly. "I can certainly wait for--"

"I don't want to be alone," John says, and visibly swallows. "Please."

Harold feels his own throat working without sound. Any other time, he would tell Mr. Reese off for joking with him, for trying to wind him up, but there's nothing but raw honesty in John's face and when Harold glances down John's hands are shaking.

He has never once, in two years of working with John Reese, seen his hands shake.

"You almost died," John says, and squints at him. "You stupid son of a bitch, I just want to _shake_ you--"

Harold feels his own eye twitch. "And what would you have had me do, Mr. Reese? Leave you and the drive up there? Lose not just the chance to stop whatever egregious cyber-bomb Ms. Stanton was planning to drop on America's _entire civic network infrastructure_ , but also my most valuable asset?"

"You'd have found a way," John insists. "New York needs you. All those people need you, and they don't even know it--"

"You're my contingency," Harold argues, glaring daggers at that offensive daub of blood, because it's easier than staring directly into Reese's eyes. "If anything, you're more necessary to the project than--"

John's incredulous half-laugh is little more than a puff of air. "Do you even listen to yourself talk? My end is replaceable. I'm _literally the replacement_ for the last guy--"

John doesn't know about Dillinger, not really, and that more than anything makes Harold angry, because he's already got some unarticulated hunch pressing up against the back of his brain, a tenuous connection between Kara Stanton and _what changed_ and one of the bullet scars on John's stomach, he's not sure exactly which, because there are _more than one of them_ that are Harold's fault, and that fact never fails to make him sick inside, makes him want to _die_.

"You are not," Harold manages, past the lump in his throat, unpleasant but at least more familiar than the nausea of his tapering adrenaline cascade "in any respect, a replacement. Or replaceable."

"Finch," John says, urgently, and reaches out to him with an unsteady hand and for an instant Harold thinks John _is_ going to shake him, but instead he's undoing the buttons of Harold's waistcoat, tugging at his tie. "Please."

John's knuckle brushes Harold's throat, rough and startlingly warm. Harold doesn't want to be alone, either, and he settles his own hands over John's as they pry at buttons, stilling them.

"All right," he says.

* * *

  
They wash in silence, occasionally bumping into one another with elbows or knees. Harold keeps his own eyes on the floor, but every time he chances to look up at Reese the man is staring at him. It should feel oppressive, but it doesn't. For whatever reason, John needs to be looking at him right now. Harold wants his friend to have what he needs.

Harold realizes that as little as he's seen of John over the last month, just snatches of security footage and the occasional blurry, slanted clip from Carter's phone, John hasn't seen Harold at all. Thank goodness he had Joss, even if they couldn't talk openly. Harold's watched John vanish into his own loneliness once already. He won't let it happen again.

When Harold's thigh spasms and his hip locks up, threatening to send him to the floor, John catches him by the elbow, one arm sliding around Harold's waist. He doesn't let go for many seconds; Harold tries not to count them. Time is still acting funny for him, stretching and compressing like putty, his brain adjusting to the aftereffects of adrenaline.

It never fails to amaze him how fragile human objectivity is, how easily perception is shaped and distorted. Harold considers himself a logical person, not easily susceptible to guile or misinformation, but he's betrayed by his own body in this like any other man. In this, as in many other things, John is better off. He's been trained by professionals, and by experience, to manage his body's responses to danger productively.

But this wasn't just danger. It was also loss, and the threat of more loss. John will have to grieve Kara Stanton, no matter what he says. Perhaps he will even have to grieve Mark Snow, although the thought makes Harold even angrier on John's behalf. Snow doesn't deserve a moment of John's attention, in Harold's opinion.

When the water runs cold, John reaches past him to shut off the shower. He's still holding Harold around the waist. Harold is surprised at his own lack of reaction to this fact, along with the nudity. Yesterday the idea of being naked in John Reese's immediate vicinity, much less being hugged by him, would have been absurd and vaguely terrifying. Now, though, Harold is mostly just tired, and grateful for John's solidity; the swell of his bicep against Harold's back, the warm print of his palm on Harold's aching hip, it's all evidence that John is back, and safe. That _Harold_ is safe.

He's been jumping at shadows in the library, without John there. Has felt the worst of his post-ferry paranoia settling over him again like a shroud, once again terribly aware of how soft a target he is.

John lets go once they need to negotiate drying off, but he keeps brushing against Harold with the back of his hand or his side, even though there's much more room in the bathroom proper than inside the shower stall. Harold is reminded of nothing so much as Bear when he's been away too long, how the Malinois will curl up right under his desk and lean into Harold's shins with his back.

Bear will be relieved to see John too, Harold thinks, and smiles.

"What is it," John whispers, and grazes the back of Harold's neck with his fingertips. His hands are steady now, Harold notes.

"You were missed," Harold says, and wants to wince at the loudness of his own voice in close quarters, the harshness of it after a long silence. It feels like the sound should break the tentative bubble John has drawn around them, and Harold's fingers grow cold in anticipation of stepping back and putting the door between them, buttoning himself back up and doing his best to forget about this entire evening, these few strange hours when all their usual boundaries are dissolved by the specter of the end.

But John just keeps stroking Harold's neck, smoothing down wet hair as Harold fastens a towel around his own waist, a twinge of self-consciousness leaking through the haze of safety and relief.

"I'm really quite--" he yawns "exceptionally--"

"Yeah," John agrees, and Harold manages to get them both into spare sweatpants (single size; Harold's too long and John's too short, but this wasn't his most extensively stocked bolthole) before passing out next to John on the (slightly musty, but made) queen in the bedroom.

* * *

Harold dreams of walking in the desert alongside a flat highway. His gait is even and long. He has been walking for days but his legs are not tired, and he is neither hungry nor thirsty. There is a building in the distance, square and tall, surrounded by concentric circles of barbed wire fence.

He has to get there, it's important. He will, eventually.

Wind blows sandy dirt in thin layers onto the road. No cars go by in either direction. The sky is as flat as the highway, but not as dark. 

Harold passes under a power line where it cuts a slender diagonal shadow across the road. He looks up. Seven barn swallows are sitting on the wire. For some reason, this makes him happy.

He's still happy when he wakes to John's hand on his bare shoulder, his whispered, "Good morning, Finch."

John's breath is slightly sour. Harold can tell because they are barely inches apart. His entire field of view is filled with John's neck and chin. He obviously hasn't shaved in several days.

Harold remembers why John hasn't shaved in several days, and angles his head under John's chin, ear to his throat, shuddering. He can hear John's pulse this way, his heartbeat. Alive. Alive.

And, he realizes, missing a shirt. As is Harold.

"Don't freak out on me," John rumbles, with a tone that suggests he is not actually worried.

"What time is it?" Harold wonders, evading the topic entirely. He doesn't know how he's going to deal, or not deal, with this. He is in uncharted territory, and he has no plans whatsoever. All his planning energy was used up last night, and he needs to recharge. He'll just have to wander directionless and hope John leads them somewhere not utterly disastrous.

"Past ten."

"Oh dear."

"Needed the sleep." John's hand migrates from Harold's shoulder to the back of his head, stroking rhythmically from the spot where Harold's hair is thinning the worst down the length of his cervical vertebrae. "How are you?"

Harold looks up, and considers the bruise over John's eye, scraped skin beginning to scab over. He traces a thumb over the roughness of it as lightly as he can, and lets his fingers travel to John's temple, where the gray is the densest. John's hair is brittle but soft, his scalp warm. He watches Harold with the most friendly of his assessing stares, the one that means 'curious, withholding judgement'.

Harold's not used to this, the sensation of falling coupled with the certainty that he will be caught. He'd always been dismissive when people tried to talk with him about faith; it just seemed like a pretty and socially sanctioned brand of willful ignorance.

John blinks slowly at him, infinitely patient.

"Happy," Harold admits, and something in John's face shifts, it feels like something in the _air_ shifts, and Harold is not generally attuned to unspoken human subtleties, but this draws him in and sweeps him up just as surely as the adrenaline did last night, and John's fingers on his cheek feel _inevitable_.

He's never thought of this before. In over two years, it has never once occurred to him. 

"Tell me to stop," John whispers, and then, "Harold," warm into Harold's mouth because Harold is kissing him, he is kissing John Reese properly, with slow and wet instead of existential terror, and seven seconds comes and goes with John's fingers on his face, in his hair, John's arms sliding around him and pulling their bodies together.

How had he never known to want this, Harold wonders, and decides that it must be one of those human weaknesses, a distortion of perception that kept something so obvious from him. A mental block, or an intelligence failure, and then he stops thinking at all because John's mouth is warm and wet and John's tongue is smooth and alive and Harold is flooded with gratitude and affection, so much he doesn't know how to bear it, how to contain it. It carries him along in a wave, swift and deafening.

John pulls back to breathe and drags Harold's hand to his lips, kisses his palm, sucks Harold's index and middle finger into his mouth, hot and obscene. Harold stares helplessly down at him, pinned by that one wet point.

"John," he whispers, and dares to stroke John's tongue with his fingertips, rocked by the strange intimacy of the act. "Whatever you need, if it's within my power--"

John's eyelashes flutter, casting long shadows across his face. He hums.

"But not--" Harold swallows. "Don't ask me to stay away. Because it does concern me, John."

"I know," John mumbles, and lets Finch's hand slip from his mouth, nuzzling at his wrist, his arm and elbow, squirming closer on the sheets. "I know, I'm sorry."

Harold bends to brush a kiss against John's hair, and John sighs warm air against his chest, and even if they both wind up dead sooner or later, Harold thinks, at least he'll have this. 


End file.
